"Allston, Aaron - Doc Sidhe 02 - Sidhe-Devil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allston Aaron)

“By giving up. My flight back home was tonight, remember? I gave up figuring out how or why you’d ditched me, headed to the airport to catch my flight, and spotted you at one of the gates. I thought about jumping on you right then and there, but I figured you’d have a harder time lying to me or ditching me again if I met you here. I checked and found out my plane would be arriving sooner-”
Gaby made a rueful face. “We couldn’t get a direct flight at the last minute. Couldn’t even get first class.”
“So I just got here and waited.”
“We should have just gone with him and helped him pack,” Gaby said, her voice resigned.
Harris grinned. “Then you could have stared at him changing the way he was staring at you.”
“Zeb! You weren’t.” She laughed.
“I wasn’t! Okay, maybe a little. Get back to the point. Where are we going, and what are you up to?”
“Okay.” Harris gave him an ingenuous look. “Here’s the short form. For the last six months, we’ve been living on another planet.” He put his index finger up to his forehead and wiggled it to suggest an antenna. “We come back to visit occasionally, but we really live there, and we shoot things for a living. Like monsters and fairies with machine guns.”
“We solve problems for a living,” Gaby corrected. “Which, to be truthful, sometimes does involve shooting things.”
“It’s a dangerous job, and we don’t like to drag other people into it. But some of the trouble has obviously spilled out into this world. Those guys at the wedding were from the other world, and we need to find out, fast, why they were here.”
“So we’re going back, tonight,” Gaby said. “We’re going to step in a magic circle and disappear, and, poof, reappear in the same place on the other world.” She gave him a smile. “Add it up, Zeb. Another planet.”
“Monsters,” Harris said.
“Magic circles.”
“Monnnsters.”
“We’re crazy, Zeb.”
Zeb fell silent, the brooding anger on his face suggesting that he didn’t want to talk about it just yet. Harris and Gaby left him in his silence until they were outside, until they were in a cab headed toward Manhattan.
“I’m going to go there with you,” Zeb said.
“No, no, no,” Harris said. “Your line is, ‘Harris, this is complete bullshit. I don’t want to talk to you for a while.’ And then we drop you off at home.”
“But it’s not bullshit, is it? I looked at those guns. I didn’t recognize the caliber of ammunition. I know a fair amount about ammunition. One of those revolvers was a break-loader-as Gaby said, like the original Webleys. Large-caliber break-loaders are pretty rare, and I don’t remember seeing any like that one before. Then there’s that thing the old guy threw at me. That was no high-tech net weapon.” He sighed. “Most of what you told me might be lies . . . but you are playing around with weird people using weird stuff. And I’m going with you so I can see the rest of it.”
Harris said, “Not a good idea. It’s a dangerous place, Zeb, especially if you don’t know your way around.”
“Harris, I’ll just bet that when you went there, you didn’t know your way around. And if I remember right, you weren’t in the best of mental shape six months ago.”
“That’s right. I was depressed, I was a loser and didn’t know why, and my brain just wasn’t firing on all cylinders. But I fell in with the kind of people who could keep me alive while I learned the ropes.”
“Well, you know the ropes now, and I’ll be with you.”
Harris shook his head. “Zeb, once upon a time I might have taken you across just so I could prove my story to you. But I’m not that insecure any more, and I’m not going to risk your life just so you’ll believe me.”
Zeb grinned at him. “Your brain still isn’t firing right. Harris, I already do believe you. That is, I believe that either you’re telling the truth, or you’re covering up for something equally unlikely. I don’t want to see it to assure myself that you’re not crazy-I just want to see it. I mean, what an incredible thing! Like discovering a lost city from the Bible, except it’s still full of people. It’ll make the universe twice as big for me.”
Gaby and Harris looked at one another again. Zeb wondered if they were somehow exchanging thoughts, but then he saw Gaby’s faint nod.
Harris turned back to him, considering something; then he collapsed in silent laughter.
“What’s with him?” Zeb asked.
Gaby shrugged. “Beats me.”
Harris wiped his eyes. “Sorry, Zeb. I was going to give you the primer on life on the fair world. That’s what they call where we’re going. And the first thing I was going to tell you was that on the fair world, the duskies don’t have all the advantages or respect of the lights and darks, so you’re probably going to meet people who’ll be nasty to you on account of your color . . . I was going to introduce this concept to you, see . . .”
Zeb gave him a pitying look. “Gaby, is there any place in town where we can buy this guy a clue?”

Zeb looked around. A twentieth-floor apartment, new furniture, framed prints on the walls, a glorious balcony view of nighttime Central Park immediately to the east. He whistled. “This must set you back a ton of money.”
Harris unzipped his duffel bag and poured its contents out on the couch. “Yep. But we make plenty. We actually get paid in gold, which is pretty cool.” He grabbed the roll of black rubber; it gave a little wiggle and resumed its faint yammering.
“You couldn’t get back to the ‘fair world’ from L.A.? That would have been more convenient, wouldn’t it?”
“No. We don’t have a transference circle there. We could have set one up there if we’d known we were going to head right back to the fair world. But we were going on our honeymoon first.”
Gaby, from inside the study, called, “Our now abandoned honeymoon. Are you going to help me with this?”
“Well, it was a second honeymoon anyway.” Harris headed into the study.
Zeb followed. The study had a wood floor. Gaby stood on the large rug that dominated the center of the floor. Together she and Harris moved the table to the corner, off the rug.
“Second honeymoon?”
Gaby knelt to begin rolling up the rug. “We were actually married months ago in Neckerdam. That’s the fair world’s New York City. The L.A. wedding was for the families.”
“So they’d shut the hell up,” Harris said, his voice a growl.
“Well, they didn’t want us to live in sin.”
“Why not? I liked it. There’s a lot of fun in sin.”
“Harris, we have company.”
Beneath the rug was a design painted on the floor. It consisted of two concentric rings of white paint; between them was a series of white symbols Zeb didn’t recognize, markings that looked like half-finished stick people. Gaby and Harris bent, noses almost to the floor, and minutely examined the white circles all the way around.
“No breaks, no changes,” Gaby said.
“Same here,” Harris said. He dropped the black thing within the inner circle and then, from a cabinet, picked up something that looked like an ancient TV set: a carved wooden case that would have looked at home in Zeb’s great-grandmother’s attic, with a small, circular glass screen in the middle of it. Harris set it down in the middle of the circle and plugged it into an electrical socket that, incongruously, was set into the floor there. A pinpoint of light appeared at the center of the screen and began growing.
Gaby knelt in front of the set, put her hands on it, shut her eyes.
“What’s she doing?” Zeb whispered.